It’s now being reported that 90 organisations have reported data breaches to the watchdog, following data hacked from Capita’s systems.

Capita is facing two data issues. The first was the cyber attack earlier this year, followed in May when news broke that Capita had left a repository of files unsecured online.

USS and Capita

The threat to its shareholders is from “no-win, no-fee” lawyers who have already set up cyber-camp outside the universities where 470,000 members of USS are thought to have had their data compromised. data-breach.com  is the first such ambulance chaser to specifically target these members, there will likely be others. These may look good bandwagons to jump on, they seldom are.

Meanwhile there are signs on social media that the nascent problems are beginning to crystallise

This whole situation is absolutely infuriating. #USS have been a disaster in many ways for years, but this leak is so stressful. The credit check is really not enough. I’ve already seen targeted adverts for a group claim against Capita, is this something worth considering? https://t.co/hiAZrFKwRI

— Peter West-Oram (@PeterWestOram) May 31, 2023

USS has put in place some support for staff who can check their situation but one USS member has published an open letter online.

There are, I am sure , straightforward answers to most of these questions and USS look like they are wanting to publish answers in a transparent way.

I suspect that neither USS or Capita are relaxed at this point. The unknown unknowns outweigh the knowns , it is very hard for anyone to scale the problem and so long as this remains the case, there will be fear amongst those who know their data is circulating on the dark web.

But there are some clear actions that can be taken by those impacted and USS have posted what they are on their website in a downloadable PDF

An earlier version of this post has been deleted due to “blogger error”.